6 Ups & 6 Downs From WWE Raw (27 April - Results & Review)

2. Impromptu-Mania

WWE tropes and booking crutches aren’t always bad – in small doses. Unfortunately, the sports entertainment juggernaut and its cadre of writers rely on them so frequently that it’s laughable.

The impromptu matchup has been an epidemic in WWE for the past couple of years now, as long-term booking has gone out the proverbial window, and they rely more on shock matchmaking to pop a crowd rather than build anticipation to a pre-planned contest through actual storytelling that fans want to see.

Monday night, Raw featured five matches, three of which were made during the course of the program: Becky Lynch versus Iyo Sky, Rey Mysterio versus El Grande Americano, and Oba Femi versus Grayson Waller.

Two of these matches will get positive marks later, but that shouldn’t obscure the fact that it’s lazy matchmaking. A whopping 23 of the 40 minutes of wrestling took place during those three booked-on-the-fly matches.

They’ve established that midcard champions can declare an open challenge whenever they want, as Lynch did, and now Oba has launched his own personal open challenge. Is this going to substitute for actual matchmaking and storytelling? A series of open challenges to fill time on Raw, and eventually they will stumble into an angle.

If you want to do this, fine, but when it’s more than half of your show, that’s lazy, unimaginative writing that smacks of hackery.

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Contributor
Contributor

Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.